That good-time feel and excellent taste are two things you can always expect from Warren Vache, and those qualities pervade Dream Dancing (Arbors). Backing Vache’s cornet are bassist Dennis Irwin, drummer Eddie Locke and, for many good measures, guests Bill Charlap on piano and Harry Allen on tenor sax. There’s not one original among the dozen tracks, but as is the habit with musical archeologists Vache and Charlap they have unearthed some inexplicably neglected standards. Without benefit of arrangements (just mutual agreement about solos), they have a ball with each tune. Following that formula, the most swinging song is the title track, which features a strong pulse, Allen and Vache listening closely to each other. Vache also quotes from Randy Weston’s “Hi-Fly” and refers to it again later. Edgar Sampson’s “Blue Lou” is a perfect jet-propelled vehicle for Vache’s muted comments, but it’s much too short, and the leader caps the session with a most heartfelt vocal on “Not Exactly Paris.”
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro